BOOK REVIEW

'Wandering Stars' by Sholem Aleichem

February 06, 2009|Jonathan Kirsch | Kirsch appeared in the role of Reb Lazar Wolf in a 1966 production of "Tevye and His Daughters" at Temple Akiba in Culver City. He is the author of 12 books, including, most recently, "The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God."

The writer known as Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich, 1859-1916) was a towering figure in the Yiddish-speaking world, praised in his own lifetime as "the Jewish Mark Twain." The critic Irving Howe later singled him out as "the one absolute Yiddish genius." When Aleichem died, some 100,000 mourners crowded the New York neighborhood in which he spent the last years of his life.

Today, however, he has been almost wholly eclipsed by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobelist whose work appeared first in Yiddish in the Jewish Daily Forward and then in the New Yorker. Compared with Singer, the comic tales of Aleichem strike critics as old-fashioned and sentimental. Indeed, if Aleichem is remembered at all nowadays, it is because his stories of Tevye and his daughters were the basis for "Fiddler on the Roof."

To introduce Aleichem to a new readership -- and to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth -- Viking is publishing a new edition of "Tevye the Dairyman" and "Motl the Cantor's Son," the books that made him famous, and a long out-of-print novel, "Wandering Stars," all freshly and lucidly translated by Aliza Shevrin.

As if to acknowledge that Yiddishisms are no longer quite as much a part of American English as they used to be, the novel is supplied with a glossary for the reader who does not already know that a momzer is a bastard, a shnorrer is a moocher, and the phrase sholem aleichem -- which the author adopted as his pen name -- is actually a traditional greeting that means "peace to you."

Set in the years before World War I, "Wandering Stars" is the story of a pair of love-struck and star-struck adolescents from a shtetl in Bessarabia -- Leibel, the son of the richest man in the village, and Reizel, the daughter of its poor but beloved cantor -- and how they make their way to America as performers who aspire to stardom in "the golden land." Starting in a backwater of the Russian empire and ending at the Bronx Zoo, the novel mirrors a journey that many of its original readers had taken themselves.

Still, "Wandering Stars" is clearly the invention of a gifted storyteller. Like Charles Dickens (and Singer too), Aleichem's work was often written for serialization in daily newspapers, which accounts for the episodic structure of "Wandering Stars" and explains why every chapter is approximately three pages long. To win and keep our attention, Aleichem embellishes the tale with close calls and outright disasters, scandals and heartbreaks, and he often whispers an aside directly to the reader about one character or another: "and it must remain between us," he will playfully caution.

To the reader who knows and loves Singer, many of the characters and scenes will seem familiar, and we can readily detect the literary DNA that he inherited from Aleichem. What is most surprising and pleasing about "Wandering Stars," however, is the glimpse that it affords into the world of Yiddish theater. "A new world revealed itself to them, in which strangely costumed people disguised themselves and strode boldly about," Aleichem writes about the first appearance of an acting troupe in the town of Holeneshti. "From the moment the curtain rose, Leibel and Reizel were enchanted, transported to a world of imps, spirits, devils, and angels. Once the curtain fell, it vanished!"

So the stage is an escape route for the young lovers in more than one sense. For the run of the play, they find a way out of the crowded houses and stifling traditions of the shtetl, sitting side by side in the darkness and daring to hold hands. But each of them is also emboldened to leave town in the wake of the traveling theater company and pursue their own stage careers in the wider world. Eventually, they are renamed Leo and Rosa, and they achieve the kind of stardom that was available to performers on the Yiddish stage -- Leo as an actor and Rosa as a singer. That's why playwright Tony Kushner, who contributes an illuminating (and not uncritical) foreword to "Wandering Stars," calls it "a great novel about theater" as well as "the catastrophe of change, shtetl dwellers becoming ghetto dwellers becoming artists, cosmopolitans, socialists or Zionists, or frequently both."